Hide Away: A new novel

I am delighted to say that I have a new novel, “Hide Away” being published by New Island Books in Sept 2024. The publisher’s blurb reads as follows:

“Hidden behind the walls of Grangegorman Mental Hospital in Dublin in 1941, four very different lives collide, all afflicted by wars, betrayals and trauma. Gus, a shrewd attendant, is the keeper of everyone’s secrets, especially his own. Two War of Independence veterans are reunited. One, Jimmy Nolan, has spent twenty years as a psychiatric patient, unable to recover from his involvement in youthful killings. In contrast, Francis Dillon has prospered as a businessman, until rumours of Civil War atrocities cause his collapse, suffering delusions of enemies seek to kill him. An English doctor named Fairfax has fled London after his gay lover’s death. Desperate to rekindle a sense of purpose, Fairfax tries to help Dillon recover by getting him to talk about his past. But a code of silence surrounds that traumatic Civil War. Is Dillon willing to break his silence to find a way back to his family?

In this superb evocation of hidden worlds, Dermot Bolger explores the aftershock within people who participate in violence and the fault-lines in any post-conflict society only held together by collective amnesia.”

Researching the fate of these veterans admitted to the Grangegorman Psychiatric Hospital fed my fascination about that asylum. Now a new university campus, back when the novel is set it was home to 2,000 patients. Established in 1814 as the Richmond Lunatic Asylum, Grangegorman became a porotype for a chain of similar asylums across Ireland. Admission was easily secured. By 1900 one in every two hundred Irish people were incarcerated in an asylum. If being admitted was easy, being released was less so. Families were sometimes so happy to be rid of bothersome relatives, that they never even bothered to claim back the personal possessions stored in the attics there.

My fascination was fed by viewing a deeply moving 2014 installation by the artist Alan Counihan, entitled “Personal Effects: A History of Possessions”, which focused on those belongings left behind by dead or discharged patients from St. Brendan’s Psychiatric Hospital, Grangegorman. I am honoured and grateful that the artist has allowed me to use on the cover of this novel, a detail from one of his photographs of those forgotten possessions.

Details of the novel will be available on www.newisland.ie